Confronting structures of domination

I28

Organizing can be a space where actions can come out and thinking can be engaged...goal setting, and thinking, and...active critical analysis can happen because we don't live in a vacuum….[I’m interested in] the ability to translate...thoughts into the world we want to see…[through] the actions that we engage in, especially when they're explicitly aimed at challenging and confronting white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, other structures of domination.

Reproducing violence

I20

One of the things...I saw a little bit while working in other countries that had had big revolutions, like Cambodia for example or some Latin American countries, is sometimes the revolution is as frightening as what was there before. It may change the power...but it doesn't seem to change what happens to people in terms of violence in their day to day life [or allow better] access to the things that they fought for. So I guess some element of me is as leery of what we will do in the name of change...

Property destruction and repression

I18

I love the black bloc going out and smashing corporate windows. I think that corporations perpetrate violence...as part of doing business and I think...it's totally justifiable to go and destroy their property, to act violently towards their property as a way of...shaking them up and [provoking] fear in them. But what does that do? It justifies the security state and it allows them to be even more dominant and predatory.

Manipulating choices

I26

I volunteered with an underground midwife....she still caught babies, still did the exact same job...but there was no funding for it, women still paid her out of pocket. So where did that take me? I guess that was a turning point in my politics because it really made me think not just about women's choices and how women conceptualize those choices and manifest them but how...the broader society manipulates women, or offers certain choices for women.

Accelerating the collapse

I2

I think that the whole concept of shit hitting the fan is a weird way to refer to a collapse that's already in progress and that's depressing. I feel like there's going to be an acceleration that could be really fast.

Social and personal change

I15

...I...realized that while I could identify what was wrong...with certain actions that promoted hate against other individuals, I didn't see how I was part of that system….It was the first time that I realized that it wasn't just about me fighting other people, it was also about me changing myself.

Solidarity and change

I25

I think the first...guiding principle when you're talking about pathways to social change is that there's not any one that's better than the others and that you constantly need to be re-evaluating which one you're on at the time because...what works in one point in time might not work in another. But I think the number one way to do it is to really join forces and have solidarity amongst different environmental, social activists, human rights, all these groups...really need to have a strong sense of community and a strong sense of solidarity so that they can mobilize.

A revolving door of resistance

I12

I feel like it's a revolving door of resistance where people are...doing stuff and they leave or people become disgruntled with it and then [even though] more people...are becoming politicized, they're not necessarily taking it a step further and really trying to push that agenda of active resistance and direct resistance against the state. [My] frustration with that is the lack of people who really want to get involved but I also have to remind myself that the place where I am at right now has taken fifteen years [for me to get to].

Managing dissent

I7

I think there's something to be said for keeping our internal struggles internal. Stephen Harper does that really well and that's not say again that we need to become authoritarian or hierarchical. It's just to say that if we're going to argue about whether we're libertarian or communist or something else we should not argue about that in the Chronicle Herald. We should not split our broader leftist movement apart publicly.

Radical dialogue

I14

For Marxism to work it has to be a discussion and if you look at the period where...the great Marxist revolutions happened, I mean the early 1900s, it was a discussion. Lenin and Trotsky would debate each other, Luxemburg would debate, other folks from Germany or from France would weigh in on those debates. It was a conversation about...what tactics the progressive movement should be using but also on the actual composition of what Marxist theory is and then with the establishment of the Soviet Union it became this very, very doctrinaire approach to Marxism which is an absolute failure and has led us to the point where I think the left is the weakest it's ever been since the rise of capitalism in a lot of ways.